Blog Hard

The first post: account for the name, manifesto-style:

1. The 'e' is self-evident. Plus, an American friend went to Spain this summer, and returned with a stray 'e' at the beginning of assorted words (e.g. eSpain, eSpanish, eTC.). The eFfect was eHumorous.

2. "Age of Precarious" was already taken.

3. As a committed statist whose skin crawls at the mention of tax cuts and the loss of personal liberty, I want the government in my life. I want to walk amongst fellow citizens and know that their stake is my stake and that the terrain we share is a combination of the respected private and the well-fostered public. The proper balance of private and public is to my mind the main challenge of sustaining an industrial nation-state (in the long-term; the unbalance in the U.S. is what makes us big, and topsy-turvy). I attempt, and fail, to always factor in the pursuit of that balance in what I do, say, and think.

My hopes for this blog are to talk about all sorts of different topics, without falling victim to self-obsession. I've spent a long time resenting blogs and bloggers, somewhat cattily so. Now I'm a copycat.




Major impetus to try my hand at blogging Number 1:

The DAAD (Deutscher Akademiker Austauschdienst, or the German Academic Exchange Service) gives a goodly sum of money to students and organizations for the purpose of studying in Germany -- a great example of a Big State using public money for public good, with immediate and tangible benefits.  And their website hosts several blogs written by students they've awarded money. In a moment of snarkiness I read several of them, with intent to lampoon. And indeed, each blog was more about the individual and his or her personal world than about anything larger. Wie, bitte? Ze German government vill pay me to talk about myzelf? Ausgezeichnet! It must all be very flattering. How readily we let vanity get the better of us!

David Brooks reported in the New York Times today ("The Fatal Conceit") that 94% of college professors polled considered themselves above average teachers. Though it should be noted that I couldn't disagree more with his conclusion, which is that the state is not to be trusted with the management or regulation of much at all.

Then finally I came across a single DAAD blogger (Griff Rollefson, with "Der Angriff" -- get it?) who actually talked about the topic the DAAD had lugged him across the Atlantic to study, instead of his meals, the emoticon settings of his friends' status updates, and how the weather had made him drowsy. His observations about music and urban/immigrant music culture in Germany in the last twenty years are pretty great; check him out.

So thanks, Griff, for setting the bar higher than belly-crawling. Writing a blog is, for me, a bit selfish no matter what, since it's the act of composition that's cathartic and not the idea of scores of readers.

Major impetus Number 2 (closely related to number 1):

I hosted two twin couch surfers from Norman, Oklahoma recently and was quickly struck by the difference in their values to my own, especially as concerns sincerity and openness as opposed to irony and snarkiness (an entry on snark, à la David Denby, is sure to follow soon). I.e. the twins from the Midwest were sincere and open, and I, attempting urbane, found a terrifying number of my utterances to be insincere, in fact quite negative. This made me feel genuinely sad.

Once, in the car, I was telling them a story about the weather in August in Munich, and the story involved my having seen an open-air performance of Hamlet in the Brunnenhof of the Residenz. (I delighted in name-dropping.) The crux of the story was that the production was terrible, unwatchably stupid.

"Oh yeah? What was it about it that was so bad?"

I found myself scrambling, being forced to talk about content, being forced to anchor my criticisms in arguments. I made it out alive -- mercifully I remembered Polonius' name -- but the twins proceeded to tell me me about a good production of Hamlet they had seen, and about what it was that made it good, and what it was that moved them, and what it meant to them.

I nodded politely, playing along well enough, but realized, with a rock of horror in my stomach, that I had in that instance opted against discussing what's at the heart of a topic in favor of dipping my toe in the periphery.

How can we resist the Spectacle, resist the once-directly-lived turning into mere representation (Guy Debord)?

Major impetus Number 3:

To have a chance to throw around phrases like "Nous ne voulons pas d'un monde où la certitude de ne pas mourir de faim s'échange contre le risque de mourir d'ennui."

("We do not want a world in which a guarantee against dying of hunger comes at the risk of dying of boredom.")

Old hat for old revolutionaries, but for me, there's an appeal as fresh as it was in Freshman English seminars.